Partisan Years Pt. 06

The pork melted in my mouth, the salt and fat godly. I was transported, somewhere away from the plundered barns and stolen hogs and naked corpses that made such a meal possible in war. The potatoes were so hot I burnt my tongue, and the hint of vinegar in the sauce cut the salt in them. I mopped up the scraps with bread.

Heinrich and the Colonel talked. Heinrich's throaty voice growing warmer, growing friendlier, his German less Baltic, less like the lilting accent of the Courlander, more like the guttural Swabian across from us. It was revolting. I was hesitant to speak. Russian is my father's tongue, and Yiddish my mother's. Byelorusian, I knew almost from birth. But of German and Polish I had only the clumsy classroom learner's grasp, good enough to hear, good enough to write. They would hear the slav when I spoke and, likely, they would hear the Jew too.

It was not the Colonel I was worried about, so much as his adjutant, the four SS officers a table over, the long table of Werhmacht and Reichskomissariat officials at the front, whores on their laps and war stories on their lips, or the boisterous table of Ukrainian and Byelorusian collaborators in the back, already drunk on schnapps and singing about the Jews they'd hung and the girls they'd raped.

That was what the German occupation was. There are some who would have you believe that it was civilized, that because they sometimes paid in silver rather than in lead they were better than our government. But that was not so. They starved us. They planned to kill sixty million Slavs and every Jew on the continent.

They stole, they shot, they swaggered. Their rule was arbitrary in its cruelty, unthinking in its policy, disorganized, petty, and stupid. For no sane man can conceive a system of war, or of government, based on the starvation of tens of millions and the permanent enslavement of hundreds of millions more. No, as I ate in that restaurant I was surrounded by an indescribable evil, a miasma of human corruption.

So I played ladylike, submissive, quiet, well mannered. I ate fast, but tried to control myself, keeping my gaze away from the Colonel's face.

The Colonel paid and brought us out to a waiting car. He'd fed his adjutant drink after drink and the boy was staggering with schnapps now, singing Edelweiss or some such sentimental nonsense.

We drove to the suite of apartments that passed for his quarters, a hotel converted into a Kommunalka and now remade into a German officer's barracks. The buildings to either side had been flattened in the battle for Minsk.

Predilection, Faithful Alyosha's words hung in my head, Predilection. The Colonel looked so trim in his winter coat and peaked cap. He wore a placid expression after two glasses of wine, but he had something sharp in his gray, deepset eyes. His nose stood out like a beak, aquiline and severe, almost roman, over a flat, Prussian mouth and a solid chin.

He sent his adjutant to bed and then took Heinrich and I up to his rooms. It was a bourgeois suite: entry, drawing room, bedroom, kitchen, study. He took us back into the study and spoke steadily about the rail administration, guarded speech.

"There's limits to the rolling stock we can allocate for new industrial enterprises dear boy," he said to Heinrich. "You understand."

"Yes," he said. "Yes I do."

It was the first concrete thing the Colonel said. At dinner he'd probed Heinrich over his own cover, asking for materials requirements and so on, and then they'd discussed tedious novels and women.

"Then let's see the proposal."

Heinrich removed the sheaf of papers containing the microfilms of false Soviet dispositions, extraneous political reports, naval tonnage, other such useless and spurious information the Abwehr never bothered to check.

"Your sources give you any trouble?"

"Those kikes in the NKVD shot one of them," Heinrich said. "The artillery major. Another's in Siberia, the Mongol, working in steel now."

"Pity," the Colonel said. "It was silly of them to rehabilitate so many men so fast. Bound to be some loose screws."

"Yes Colonel Pfrondorf."

"Any operational information?"

"Plenty," Heinrich said. He shifted uncomfortably. The Colonel's face fell. He nodded to me.

"And her?"

"She's in my company, Siegfried," Heinrich said.

Colonel Pfrondorf shoved a briefcase containing the Abwehr's handpicked chickenfeed at Heinrich. "Go see if it's acceptable."

He stood. I stood too. The Colonel shook his head.

"We're going to discuss the future of Greater Germany," he said. "And your place in it."

So my time had come. Heinrich looked defeated as he walked out. Colonel Pfrondorf looked me over.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen, Herr Oberst."

"My name, Miss Bezhukov, is Siegfried," he said. "And that's a pity. Nineteen. Still young, but you must feel the weight of maturity approaching. Still, a great age, perhaps at which to see the world turn on a new axis. The right axis. Everything returned to its place."

The hairs on my neck stood up. I hoped there was something I could get from him, something about the railways.

"Your people could be great," he said. "The Asiatic Slav will prosper and thrive under the tutelage of the Teutonic warrior. And without the communist or the Jew to beguile and exploit him, man will rise to his greatest heights."

What, I asked myself, is higher than an ash cloud over a crematorium. I must've mumbled something.

In preparation for this meeting, I'd worn fine stockings, held up by a garter, silk underwear, and a french brassiere outfitted with lace. I could feel the sweat beginning, under my good clothes and under the finery intended to present my sex to Colonel Siegfried Pfrondorff like a gift wrapped for Christmas.

"You don't talk much."

"There's no need for a woman to speak when wise men are giving council."

"You're beautiful like a German," he said, closing the distance. The leather of his jackboots squeaked and his uniform rustled. I closed my eyes. A white flinted road through fields in the high summer sun lay before me.

"This dark hair," he touched me. "And what a delicate face. You don't look like one of those beastly Russians, or like a Yid at all."

The Colonel had soft hands, unused to rifle bolts or winter cold, the fingers of a military bureaucrat.

"I don't suppose Heinrich would let such a thing as you go untouched," he said, laughing to himself. "But what's the shame in having the second slice of a cake?"

His hands settled at the back of my dress. His voice purred and he quoted inanities at me. At first I expected tearing fabric, popping buttons, searing pain. But he worked with precise movements, until the dress fell away.

Colonel Siegfried Pfrondorf kissed me then. I pulled away, unconsciously, and his grip tightened on the back of my neck. I knew what it meant.

He kissed along my neck, down the shoulder, opened my brassiere, and settled his mouth on my nipple. He nipped at it. Then he probed at me, sliding his one hand between my legs, manipulating me by the neck, his hand in my hair like you'd grab a cat by the scruff.

I wasn't wet.

I couldn't be wet. Not with the smell of pork clinging to him and my head full of the weevils in the bread set aside for those hollow cheeked girls with the yellow stars in the textile mill. Beautiful girls with fine faces, ugly girls, girls who'd once been fat, old women, young mothers still flush with love for their children. Soon, the Germans would bring in the shovels and hack open the cold earth and lay them down and shoot them one-by-one to save four hundred grams of bread and thirty grams of cooking oil a day.

The Colonel pressed his finger at my entrance. I felt it as a cold touch, alien. He kept exploring me, touching me all over like I was a piece of merchandise. My body didn't respond. I could sense his intent wasn't human, but the acquisitiveness of a ledgerbook with the authority of life and death.

Then I was laying on the desk with his bulk over me and the belt at his trousers gone. He was engorged with lust. He pulled my underwear aside, pushed at my cunt. Pain flashed up, distant. I receded into myself.

It hurt. Bit by bit he forced his cock inside of me. All the old defenses refused to work. But I knew that if I fought, or if I screamed, he would hurt me, and that if I made things hard for Heinrich he would leave me for the Germans.

I couldn't help myself, as Siegfried Pfrondorf forced his penis inside me, I began to cry. I had to grit my teeth against the pain to keep from moaning. It was worse in my pussy than any time since the first. Siegfried regarded me only as so much meat. He was fucking me, but it was mechanical, the exercise of his pleasure rather than the overflow of desire or even of a need to hurt a girl.

His cock was full inside me now.

"Heinrich told me you're a Jewess," he said.

I covered my face with one hand, as if it would stop my tears. He pulled most of the way out, spat on himself, then slid back in. I couldn't get wet, not for him, not for this.

"I can see it," he said. "That's the best part, out in the Reichskommissariat, no one really cares about the Nuernberg laws. It's all part of the war. Because none of you will live long enough to have impure children. There's no diminution of the blood."

He sped up and I hissed with pain. It was lessening somewhat, from the feel of tearing flesh and searing nerves to mere discomfort. But the emotional pain was awful. I alternated between covering my face and staring at the ceiling as he fucked me. Anything, I kept thinking, anything for the Union, anything for revenge.

"But you have an exceptional body. Much stronger than those mill girls," he said. "Can you say something in Yiddish for me. One of your prayers maybe. When I was a young man there was a little Yid with a delicious cunt in my town. I had her like the Pharaoh, you see, and she used to scream, what was it? Yes, Deliver Me Adonai."

His strange, uncaring expression, the lack of lust in his face, drove me further mad, and I cried out in terror. I was tired of speaking when men wanted, of cumming when they wanted, of being what they wanted. Why had they come to murder us in the thousands? Why had they unleashed this? What had we done wrong? Nothing. Of course. Just their human will. It would be better if they were automata of steel, rather than beasts of flesh.

"Shut up, hole," he said as I cried. Then he clamped his hand over my mouth and accelerated. He leaned over. And all I could think of was shell fire and firing squads, shallow graves and hunger. All that I had seen, all that I had lived, multiplied across the whole of Russia and the whole of Europe. And the girls in the textile factory, how they were, to the Germans, just spindles with cunts, and when they wore out they could be discarded.

This was the end result of the crimes of that Judas Ebert and that Caesar Noske. Then I was crying not for myself, but for Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Jogiches and Mehring, all the others shot or tortured or broken in that first defeat, that White Terror that led us here, to Minsk and the ending of the world. They'd been the pride of international socialism, their lives the red light presaging the great dawn.

Only it was evening now. The last red gleam before the perfect blue of the eternal night.

Pfrondorf fucked me faster and I sobbed into his hand. I wanted my Soviet assailants, men with hearts and desires and hatred, not this alien thing, who abhorred to touch me, whose idea of sex was the mere use of an orifice.

Siegfried pulled out and took his hand from my face and stroked himself as he finished, stepping aside the desk so his cock aimed at my me like a rifle. He came then, laughing as spurts of ejaculate landed on my cheeks, my forehead, my lips, on my closed eyelids.

"Heil Hitler," he said.

Heinrich did not speak to me on the ride back to our hotel, or in the morning, when I was sullen and still.

There were men in the cafeteria of the hotel, Germans and Italians and Hungarians, soldiers and businessmen and politicians, it was the only real hotel open in Minsk. Heinrich was too absorbed in a copy of the Voelkischer Beobachter to pay me any heed.

But I knew this was my chance to get the answer as to why the freight trains were running southeast instead of along the Smolensk line.

So I sat at the bar, sipping black coffee and smoking German cigarettes, waiting and looking. It was March now, the days longer, and a white light poured into the hotel from the broad windows. A Captain sidled up to me, his name was Hechinger.

I spoke to several men like that, I laid out the cover story while I fluttered my eyelashes and bit my lower lip.

But none gave me anything of value, until the evening, after another day of picking up stashed intelligence and talking to businessmen and planners to maintain our cover. We were back in the hotel, Heinrich reading through some files, and me at the bar.

Captain Hechinger was back again, a Prussian from Poznan, in the supply service. He was handsome, with the fencing scars common to the aristocratic line officers. I made sure Heinrich saw as I retired with Captain Hechinger to the rarely used women's room.

The Captain pushed me against the wall. I was still sore from the day before, but I was angry with Heinrich and angry with all the Germans and this translated into a cruel arousal. And he was handsome and stupid in the rough way of a professional soldier, a man who believes that because his country is undertaking something, it is right.

He kissed me, his big tongue sliding into my mouth. I took my great coat off and hung it from a hook on the inside of the door, and pulled him towards me. I'd worn a slip under the dress, and in a moment, my heart was beating and the heat was up inside me, his hands at the buttons. I shrugged the dress off and hung that over the coat.

"Your employer," Hechinger said as he pressed my head back against the wall. "Will he challenge me for you?"

"No," I said. "He likes that I do this."

Then his hands slipped between my thighs, under the smooth fabric of the slip, to my cunt. He rubbed me over my underwear, staring into my eyes, his hand on the back of my neck. He pushed my panties aside and ran a finger along my opening. I was wet for him, yes, and ready, but still I ached. Pfrondorf, that cold thing, had left me wounded. But Captain Hechinger slipped two fingers inside me and I gasped.

"Shh," he said. "The proprietor won't take kindly to this."

There was nothing I wanted more, at that moment, than to feel him inside me, see the fevered look in his eyes, know that I had him, then to taste his cum. My legs quivered in anticipation.

He had me backed against the sink basin, sitting up on it more or less, as he fingered me. I kissed him, then bit the fabric of his tunic at the shoulder to keep from crying out. I offered my cunt up to him. He was Vladimir, he was Kiril Denisovich, he was Lev, he was Lazar, every man I'd ever wanted. It didn't matter that he was one of those inhuman beasts, that if he knew my name and parents he'd beat me until I could barely breathe and hand me then to the police. It mattered that he wanted me and I needed him, and I could use my body to get from him the information a man trained in intelligence would never divulge.

He pulled the strap of the slip down and toyed with my breast. I was soaking for him. He curled the fingers inside me, stroking at the spot that made me hiss in pleasure, and I arched my back, my hands grasping at the sink's edge for balance. It was one of the big, enameled cast iron sinks.

"Fuck me," I said. "Now. Please. I need you."

He grinned, his breath heavy with want. He pulled his fingers out and rubbed at my clit for a sharp moment and I had to bite his shoulder again as I came and shook against him.

Then he was between my legs with his cock out before the shudders of orgasm had left me, and the feel of him in my sore, weary cunt was blissful. I pulled him to me, wrapped my legs about his back.

"Just give me warning," I said. "And I'll take your seed in my mouth."

"Naturally," he said. I overbalanced in my lust, and he staggered back, but then turned me, so I stood, and faced the dirty, cracked mirror over the sink. He entered me again from behind, his hands all over, one on my breast, one on the taut muscles of my stomach under the slip. I'd never seen myself fucked before, except as a dissociative vision, and the feel of him inside me, the look on his face, the attitude of my body under his power, reawakened the pleasure.

"There," I said, as he slammed into me, struggling to control himself. My hips bounced off the edge of the sink as he buried himself in me. He sped up then, grasping my hips as he drove himself inside me, harder and harder. I felt on the edge of orgasm, for a long, long minute, but never quite crossed it, sliding back from pleasure a bit as my eyes found the insignia at his collar and I remembered who was inside me.

"Now," he said.

He pulled out and I got down and took him in my mouth. A swipe of the tongue and the feeling of the back of my throat was all he needed. He came then, heavy jets of him, a touch salty, a touch sweet. I sucked it down, licked him clean, savored it. There is something almost sacramental in the act of swallowing. It is less degrading than cleaning cum out of your ass, and less dangerous than having it dripping in your cunt.

"You're beautiful," he said. "For a Russian."

"I'm not Russian at all," I said. "I come from Lithuania, a real German."

He nodded. "I knew it."

Captain Hechinger tucked his dick back into his pants and offered me a cigarette. I was still shaky, still flushed with want, my head swimming with shame and lust. I wanted to cry, again, the way I had when Tigran had fucked me in the garret of the NKVD compound, because it felt so odd to go from the brittle, glassy state that follows rape to this sweating, desirous, height of pleasure. The thought flashed in my mind to take the Walther from his holster and paint the mirror with my brains.

I kept all but the slightest shudder from my voice when I spoke.

"My boss thinks this city will work well for the purpose of his enterprise," I said. "We can have the machines on a train and here in a few weeks, in time for the spring drive on Moscow."

"Your man's a fool," he said. "Everyone knows the big contracts will be in the Ukraine, the Donbas, the Kuban."

"The Kuban?" I said. "Don't the Bolsheviks..."

"For now, Anna Bezhukov," he grinned, using my cover name. "But once Kerch is freed, we'll liberate the rest of the Ukraine and the Caucasus."

"Are you going south then?" I said. "I don't think we have any contacts in Kiev."

"No matter," he said. "There will be plenty of work when we make Russia into our Kalifornia."

He drew on the cigarette.

"I'm going south," he said. "Soon. They'll need men like me to repair the lines from Kiev to Kharkov, and in the Crimea."

"Are you sure?" I asked. "I'd. If I come to Minsk from Vilnius, I'd like to see you."

He laughed. "The orders haven't come through yet. But everyone knows. There's Oil in Baku and Grozny. There's hardly enough in Rumania. And we need the grain of the black earth belt. Moscow will fall if we deprive her of twenty million tons of oil and thirty million tons of wheat."

We took great pains to avoid detection as we went back to the world of the Partisans. I told Heinrich what I'd heard of the southern drive, and the passage of so many trains south.

But in April, with spring on the land, when Faithful Alyosha arranged a rendezvous and showed me Heinrich's report, there was no mention of the south. Only political reports on anti-partisan activities and nakedly fraudulent train timetables in the direction of Smolensk, and draft orders summoning so many German divisions to relieve Rzhev. Some of the documents we'd picked up at the dead drops were missing too.